Find a Question:

Nvidia announces new mobile chip with eight cores and GPU to Maxwell

Jan

5

2015

Chip company Nvidia has on the eve of CES announced a new mobile chip called Tegra X1. The soc is composed of eight 64-bit processor cores and a GPU, which is based on the Maxwell-architecture. Nvidia sees the automotive industry as a key market for the Tegra X1.

Nvidia explained when announcing particular emphasis on the GPU of Tegra X1, which is based on the same design as Maxwell Nvidia’s latest graphics cards for desktops and laptops. According to the chip designer refers to the first mobile GPU which has more than one teraflops of computing power when processing 16 bit floating point numbers. That is considerably more than 365 gigaflops of Tegra K1 and according to Nvidia, the GPU is much faster than the GPU in a fast desktop CPU from Intel, such as the 4790K.

In addition to the Maxwell GPU Tegra X1 contains eight 64bit processor cores, presumably based on Nvidia’s own Denver design introduced the Tegra K1. These eight cores according to Nvidia are arranged in a 4 + 4 formation, which probably means that four cores are clocked lower and only be used at lower processor load, which is similar to ARM’s big.Little format.

Nvidia Tegra X1
Nvidia Tegra X1Nvidia Tegra X1Nvidia Tegra X1
Nvidia made little further details about the Tegra X1 known. It is still not clear which clock ticking eight cores. It is nothing known about the clock speed of the GPU, the design of the memory controller or the production process used. However, Nvidia announced that the GPU has 256 CUDA cores and hardware support has to h.265- and VP9 codecs in a 4k resolution 60fps and a 10-bit color depth. The demonstration of a graphics demo based on Unreal Engine 4 was reported that the chip up to 10W burned.

Thus the X1 seems not intended for use in phones or tablets. Nvidia called that product or not, but focused on the automotive industry. The company has for car manufacturers even developed a small computer system, based on the Tegra X1, called Drive CX. Manufacturers can use this hardware to control all computer systems in their cars. Nvidia also provides a runtime with, called ‘Drive Studio’, which should facilitate developing for the platform.